Oh baby! Have we got a lot to share about dogs and babies. This blog is written by Certified Professional Dog Trainer Jenn Merritt and her dog Royal. Jenn specializes in helping expectant pet parents and pet parents with new babies adapt to life with their dogs. Royal specializes in squirrel investigation, attempted motorcycle herding, and sleeping belly up.

Sunday, October 31, 2010

Prepare your Puppy for Halloween adventures

Today is Halloween, which is a special night that humans dress up, act foolish and eat candy. What is up with you people anyway? And then you do stuff like this to us! So Halloween can be a weird experience for a puppy to see humans with masks and costumes on. Which is why it is a good idea to expose your puppy to all sorts of weirdness like masks, hats, and costumes BEFORE encountering them on Halloween. That's why Jenn always dons a hat or mask or costume when she is teaching puppy classes.

So you would think that Jenn would have prepared our puppy Jet, so that Halloween would not be a big deal. And Jenn thought she had covered all the bases by exposing Jet to lots of calm, gentle children of different ages.But because Jet had not experienced one thing-Face Paint, things got a little out of hand.

Today, on a visit over to Bill and Meghan's house, Jet encountered their daughter Eva getting ready to enjoy Halloween and her face was painted with pretty little butterflies. Well, that face paint totally freaked Jet out! She started barking and growling at Eva and it scared her. Jenn tried to calm Jet down and distract her to get her out of the whole situation quickly.

Jenn came home very worried that Jet would bark and lunge at a child. It is very important that we all like children, cause Jenn and Eric's friends have lots of kids. So, Jenn got to work on a plan to help Jet feel more comfortable around kids and around face paint. First, Jenn is going to make sure that Jet spends more time every day having a calm, positive experience with a child. This is a challenge for folks that don't have children of their own, so you've got to go where the kids are. This means inviting people over that have children or lots of field trips to different places where kids will be. And letting nice, gentle kids give Jet a command and then give her a reward (like cheese or chicken). We always want Jet to think that kids are super great (which they are). We'll see how Jenn's plan for Jet goes.